1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to computer systems. More particularly, it is directed to management of digital media objects using computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, the advent of cheap processing power, storage devices and networking capabilities has made digital manipulation and transmission of media objects such as photographs, movies, and audio files more and more common. The sales of digital media management devices such as recording and playback devices for audio and video as well as digital cameras have increased at a rapid pace. In addition, more and more users, including media professionals as well as amateurs with varying levels of skill, have begun using software tools to manage their media assets. A number of different software tools and services may be used, for example, to perform tasks related to digital photographs, such as organizing an album, creating slide shows, adding captions, making photographs accessible to friends and family via the Internet, e-mailing photographs, and the like. Other tools may allow a user to purchase audio content over the Internet, categorize a collection of MP3 or other digital audio files into “playlists”, exchange songs with friends, and so on.
As the prices for acquiring and storing digital media objects continues to fall, the number of objects that a typical professional or amateur user may have to manage may increase dramatically. For example, a family with one or more digital cameras may acquire thousands of digital photographs relatively quickly. Unfortunately, depending on the source from which the digital media objects are obtained, the quality of the objects' content may vary widely. For example, even experienced users of relatively sophisticated digital cameras may sometimes take photographs that may benefit from editing operations such as cropping, sharpening, changing light levels, removal of “red-eye” (a phenomenon in which photography subjects' eyes appear to be red as a result of a use of a flash), and the like. Manipulating each photograph of a large photograph collection individually to correct its defects may require more time and effort than a typical user may desire.
Some digital media management software, such as certain photography tools, may support batch-mode operations to help users with the management of large numbers of media objects. For example, a sequence of modification or correction operations, such as image sharpening, contrast increase, cropping, auto-orientation correction, and/or red-eye removal may be recorded for one digital photograph, and then applied as a batch operation to a set of photographs. The sequence of modifications may thereby be applied to each photograph of the set, with certain changes limited to a subset of the photographs to which the changes are determined to be applicable by the software tool—e.g., red-eye removal may be applied only to those photographs in which the tool identifies one or more excessively reddened eyes. Despite the increased sophistication of digital media software, however, a batch-mode operation may sometimes fail to provide desired results or improvements to a digital media object; for example, the cumulative effect of the sequence of changes intended to improve a given original photograph of the set may actually result in the photograph appearing worse than the original to the user. Inspecting each digital media object included in a batch operation (especially a batch operation that potentially modifies hundreds or thousands of objects) after the entire sequence of requested modifications has been applied may not be a productive use of the user's time. It may be hard, for example, to determine exactly which of the requested modifications were actually applied to a given object, and which modifications led to the undesired results. It may also be nontrivial to undo some modifications on the given object while still retaining the effects of other modifications of the sequence.